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I generally station my laptop at home and use it for long sessions with the power plugged in, is that ok? Will it overcharge the battery and spoil it? Or does it stop charging the battery once it is full?
I do the same. It does cause a little damage to the battery, but not enough that I'm too concerned. With two years of being plugged in 90% of the time my battery was only reduced to 80% functionality.
If you're concerned, check out the battery care guide:
Your laptop should be fine; laptops can handle it. Your battery stops charging once it hits full. Your battery capacity may very slightly decrease faster due to the heat.
removing the battery when operating can be really bad.
Say their is a brown out, or a power surge, your power supply will shut off, and everything you are working on gets deleted. If you had the battery inside, you would still be working, and have all of your data.
As arkitect mentioned, the battery will only charge as long as their is a voltage potential between the charging circuit, and the internal voltage of the battery. When this potential becomes zero, the battery becomes fully charged, and the electrons simply pass bypass battery, since the cells are already completelty charged.
No damage is done to a battery by leaving it plugged in all of the time.
The only way batteries will wear, is if they are discharged, and then immediately recharged. The heat is what kills the batteries. Discharging causes the battery to get hot, and then charging it right back up causes it to get even hotter, which causes wear to the battery cells.
The proper way to recharge the battery is to let it cool back down to room temperature before charging back up again.
For most people this isn't an issue. All current web-browsers save the tabs you are working on, Microsoft Office saves all the files and let’s recover them, etc. For 95% of the time it’s just a matter of 2 minutes to restart your computer. Also, where I live, its generally pretty obvious when things are going to happen, so you should have enough time to stick your battery in before power is totally lost.
Again I disagree VERY much. First of all we know that Li-Ion is ALWAYS wearing out, and we only effect the rate at which it wears. The two worst things for these batteries are a high state of charge and heat. Laptops produce a LOT of heat any time they are running. If you are actually working on the laptop, a bunch more, and if you’re maxing your system it gets even hotter.
Thus leaving in your battery so that it is (for me) at 96-100% of charge vs. 85%, and dealing with 140 degree F vs. 66 degrees F is a big deal. I move my laptop about once every three days, so for me I nearly always remove it around 80% charge and just plug it in a few minutes before I leave which take sit up to 90-95%.
I don’t blame anyone who wants to leave theirs inside the laptop, but don’t think that it doesn’t matter; you will reduce the life of your battery much faster than if you removed it.
Well, the wear of the battery will only drop if the battery is getting hot from the notebook. In 24 of the 27 laptops I have owned, the battery was under the palmrest, and never got hot because of the rest of the computer was separated in the rear of the laptop, with cooling vents out the back. On my other 3 laptops, two of them have the battery located on the side and only my lenovo has it on the back. The two with the battery on the side never had battery heating problems. The one with the battery in the back does get warm, but it is not overwhelming.
You do bring up good points, and I am not arguing you with that. I did mention that heat is what kills the batteries, but as I forgot, the rest of the system may cause the battery to get hot from heat radiation, thus slowly killing the battery. Almost all of my systems have really good cooling systems, and the batteries do not get remotely warm from standard use on ac power, so I dont have to worry.
I did forget that alot of the new laptops on the market have the placement of the battery in the back, near the cpu vents, so in that case thermal energy will radiate and warm the battery, thus slowly eating away the batteries cells.
The wear on the battery will depreciate much faster depending on the location of the battery, and how hot it is getting from normal use.
I recommend removing the battery if it does get hot under normal ac power use, but if it does not, than there is no sense in removing it. Batteries are usually good to 140F, but in excess of that or at temperatures up and above 130F or so will cause premature death of the battery.
Just keep the system elevated a little bit in the back, and air will circulate underneath, keeping everything cool.
Leaving the battery in has worked for me, and most of my batteries have been working fine for 5-7 years, and I even have a few over 12 years old.
This isn't completely correct. Unlike other rechargeable cells, it is dangerous to continue charging LiIon cells after they have reached 100% charge. So, all LiIon chargers will turn off when it detects the batteries are fully charged. And in laptops, the charger will not turn on again until the battery charge has dropped a certain amount. In the laptops I have checked (ASUS F3SV, T40 and DELL 3800), the charging kicks in at 95%.
As the batteries have some self-discharge, they will eventually drop below 95% charge and the charging will start. But, this should be infrequent and have very little effect on the overall life. If this was the only reason for the battery to be recharged, I would expect the battery to reach it's practical shelf life first.
For 95% of what we do, that is correct. But, there is the 5% that isn't backed up correctly during use. My son uses OpenOffice for his homework. Recently he had the system freeze while using this. OpenOffice recovered only the first two words and he lost about two hours of work (of course, he should have saved more often).
You are right about heat. But as to the batteries getting to hot in a laptop, that is not my experience. Any time I have pulled the battery out of a laptop that had been plugged in for a while (system in use, battery fully charged for over an hour) the battery has been cool to the touch and appears to have been at room temperature.
The battery would last longer if stored in the recommended way. For LiIon cells this is at 40% charge in a cool dry place (sealed in a fridge but not frozen). But I don't feel that this is enough of an advantage for most people.
I should say with this that I actually use the battery in my laptops. Work days they get at least an hour on battery during the commute. At home, the battery gets used when the laptop is moved between the table and the lounge.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
